The President's Hat

by Antoine Laurain

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Then I suppose you understand whose hat it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so I can count on your discretion …’

  ‘You can indeed,’ said Daniel, ‘though I do have one request.’

  ‘Yes?’ said the man at the other end of the line.

  ‘I should like to hand the hat back to the owner myself.’

  ‘That is precisely how the owner of the hat would like to receive it, Monsieur Mercier. He suggests meeting at Caffè Florian at five o’clock, in the first room on the left as you come in.’

  At 4.40 p.m., Daniel put Mitterrand’s hat on one last time, kissed Véronique and Jérôme, and left them on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute.

  ‘I have an appointment with François Mitterrand, I’ll be back shortly,’ he announced loudly, in front of a group of tourists who turned round to stare.

  Then he walked off in the direction of a gondola. He didn’t quibble over the fare for the ride to San Marco, nor did he sit on the little red leather seat, but remained standing in the middle of the boat with the hat on his head and his face caressed by the warm salt air of the Adriatic.

  At the entrance to Caffè Florian, he was approached by the Brylcreemed Italian head waiter, a rotund man with a slender moustache.

  ‘I have a meeting with François Mitterrand,’ said Daniel, taking off his hat.

  The maître d’ inclined his head and led the way silently to the small room off to the left. Beneath a fresco of an angel, the President of the French Republic was sitting at a small white marble table. He was wearing a dark coat and a claret-coloured scarf. He got to his feet.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Mercier.’ He shook Daniel’s hand.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur le Président,’ answered Daniel.

  Then, at the President’s invitation, he sat down next to him. François Mitterrand ordered a coffee, which was brought immediately on a silver tray.

  ‘There is a reward, as indicated on the slip of paper,’ announced the First Frenchman.

  ‘No,’ said Daniel, quietly, ‘I don’t want a reward.’

  François Mitterrand gave a partly amused, partly resigned smile.

  ‘Since you do not want a reward, I will tell you a secret … This hat … I did not lose it in Venice, but in Paris, some time ago.’ He paused. ‘It must have had quite a few adventures before ending up on this table,’ he added, stroking the felt, ‘but we shall never know.’ He stared at Daniel, smiling enigmatically.

  ‘No, we’ll never know,’ said Daniel, transfixed by the President’s gaze.

  There was a further silence, and then François Mitterrand bent forward to take small sips of his coffee. Through the half-open window, Daniel glimpsed the sunlit Piazza San Marco and the crowds passing beneath the arches of the Procuratie.

  ‘Do you come to Venice often?’ asked the President.

  ‘I hadn’t been since my honeymoon, but I’ve come back now with my wife and son.’

  ‘You are right to come back. I come whenever I can.’

  ‘Yesterday, we climbed to the top of the Bovolo,’ said Daniel.

  ‘You are a man of taste, Monsieur Mercier. The Campanile is for tourists, but only those who truly love Venice climb the Bovolo. There’s a beautiful cloister just near here, too, the only example of Romanesque art in Venice. Very few people know it. I will show you on our way out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ murmured Daniel.

  ‘When I think that there are people who say Venice is a melancholy place …’ the head of state went on, blinking.

  ‘I’m not one of them,’ said Daniel. ‘For me, Venice is uplifting … and Venice is beauty.’

  ‘Yes, beauty …’ agreed François Mitterrand.

  Daniel was living his reward, right here, right now. Beyond any material recompense, his wish, his dream, his heart’s desire had been granted.

  He had become the fourth guest at the President’s table.

  Epilogue

  The black-and-white photograph was so beautifully printed it could almost have been a Cartier-Bresson. The picture showed Daniel Mercier on his way out of the SOGETEC building, the black felt hat on his head. The man in the grey tie looked intently at his colleague, before turning to the President.

  ‘We can get it back, Monsieur le Président.’

  ‘How do you plan to go about it?’ asked the head of state, from behind his spectacles.

  ‘We overpower him in the street and take it back.’

  ‘No!’ exclaimed François Mitterrand. ‘No violence. He’d guess straight away that I was behind it … No,’ he repeated softly, and sank into one of his frequent, disconcerting silences. ‘Follow it.’

  ‘“It”, Monsieur le Président?’

  ‘The hat, of course.’

  And the man in the grey tie left the office accompanied by his colleague.

  An hour after the President had left his hat in the brasserie, two of his security officers had gone back to collect it. The hat was no longer there. It was a clear case of theft. The head waiter confirmed that the man at the table next to the President’s had left wearing a black felt hat. Had he been wearing it when he came in? Confused and embarrassed, the head waiter confessed that he could not be sure. The man was not a regular customer, he hadn’t booked, and had paid by Carte Bleue. The men from the Élysée left with a copy of the receipt. Daniel Mercier was located the very next day.

  When Daniel left the hat on the train, a telex arrived on the Élysée’s private line that same evening, announcing that it had been picked up by a blonde woman. The following morning, François Mitterrand, who never slept at the Élysée, read the message over coffee.

  ‘How interesting,’ he said. ‘A woman? Do we have a picture?’

  Later that day, a photograph of Fanny Marquant in Parc Monceau landed on the President’s desk, with an accompanying note: ‘The woman left the hat on a bench; the man who picked it up is currently being investigated.’

  ‘Why did she leave it on the bench?’

  ‘I don’t know, Monsieur le Président. We’re looking into every possible explanation,’ replied the man in the grey tie.

  ‘She’s a very attractive woman,’ observed the head of state before handing back the photograph.

  When Daniel’s notice appeared in the newspaper, it was immediately picked up. Élysée security officers asked the newspaper for a copy of every letter received in response, in the interests of national security.

  And so, on a sunny afternoon in the grounds of the Élysée Palace, the President was able to read Fanny Marquant’s short story ‘The Hat’.

  Some time later, when he learnt that the perfumer Aslan had launched a new fragrance, François Mitterrand had his people get hold of a bottle.

  When the men from the Élysée learnt from one of the letters that Aslan no longer had the hat, the news provoked a flurry of anxiety that lasted several hours. How could he no longer have it when he had been wearing it on his way home just the previous day?

  For several weeks, the man in the grey tie studiously avoided the subject with the head of state. Then came Aslan’s more detailed letter about the loss of the hat.

  Two men were immediately despatched to the brasserie. Armed with fake tax-office identity cards, they pored over the accounts and identified Bernard Lavallière, who had paid by cheque, as the new wearer of the hat. The resulting surveillance operation was centred on Rue de Passy.

  ‘The perfumer no longer has the hat? And you hadn’t noticed …’

  ‘No, Monsieur le Président. There was something of a mix-up.’

  ‘How very vexing,’ said the head of state tightly. ‘Who is this Lavallière?’ he added.

  ‘A man from AXA. There’s a dossier on its way, Monsieur le Président.’

  Some time later the man in the grey tie came to find the President at the bottom of the Élysée Palace garden, where he was throwing sticks for his black labrador.

  ‘Mercier has stolen
it,’ he announced.

  ‘Indeed? He really is a very resourceful chap.’

  That same afternoon, François Mitterrand asked for the Librairie de la Mouette to be added to the list of bookshops supplying the Élysée.

  ‘There are no new developments in the case of the hat, Monsieur le Président,’ said the man in the grey tie one day, during a review of the President’s private files. ‘Should we continue to have it followed?’

  ‘No,’ said the head of state, after a moment’s thought. ‘Let destiny take its course,’ he added meditatively.

  ‘Destroy or archive, Monsieur le Président?’

  ‘Destroy, of course.’

  The next day, the man in the grey tie returned to the President’s office with the hat dossier under his arm. François Mitterrand put on his glasses, leafed through the reports and photographs one last time, and paused to look at the picture of Fanny Marquant sitting in Parc Monceau with his hat on her head. He removed it from the file and put it to one side.

  ‘Personal archives,’ he said.

  Then he initialled the order to destroy the rest.

  Twenty years later, on 29 January 2008, François Mitterrand’s private effects were sold at auction, at Paris’s Hôtel Drouot.

  The 369 lots included his suits, ties and shirts, personal gifts from foreign heads of state, and no fewer than nineteen hats: five felt hats, two woollen hats, one in suede, two top hats, a bowler, and eight straw boaters.

  The black Homburg bought by the French Socialist Party that day may or may not have been the hat in this story. Every hat-wearer’s life is measured in a succession of headgear that wears out, is mislaid and found, or sometimes never seen again.

  The fact that this was the only black hat in the sale is curious indeed: did he have others? Probably. Did his relatives hold on to them? Quite possibly. We will never know.

  And as the hammer fell on each lot, Pierre Aslan was sipping a glass of Asti across the square from the Uffizi Palace in Florence. After his dazzling return to the international scene, he created no further fragrances. It was a deliberate decision.

  He preferred to bow out on a high note and focus on building his personal legend. Some sources claim he went on concocting perfumes in secret for private clients, charging a small fortune for his services. The Sultan of Brunei and even Bill Gates were among the names mentioned, but this was never confirmed.

  Pierre Aslan moved to Florence where he still lives today, out of the public eye. He has granted no interviews since 1987.

  Fanny Marquant’s lover Édouard Lanier continued to cheat on his wife, who asked for a divorce in 1992. He remarried a much younger woman, who cheated on him in turn, then left him. After retiring from his post at Danone, he invested his money in a chain of massage parlours in Thailand, where he lived with a woman named Bongkoj. He has been missing since the tsunami of 2004.

  Dr Fremenberg died silently in his consulting room one day in 2001, in the middle of a therapy session. His African art collection was sold at Christie’s in 2002 as the ‘Collection of Dr F.’.

  The statuette with the erect penis that Aslan had so disliked was auctioned for 120,500 euros including costs. It is now in a private collection in Washington.

  Esther Kerwitcz carried on touring until 2000, after which she decided to end her concert career and made just four final recordings. Known to music lovers today as the ‘Tetra Kerwitcz’, they are some of the most downloaded classical performances on the web. She lives in Florence with Pierre Aslan.

  Fanny Marquant became the widow of Michel Carlier – the man in the grey hat – a few years after opening her bookshop.

  She ran the business for another fifteen years and had many lovers, until a British lord fell madly in love with her during a holiday on the Normandy coast. He married her and took her to Sussex, where Fanny was extremely bored.

  She has still not mastered the English language. Her short novel The French Lady was a critical success, with enthusiastic reviews in the British press and an author interview in the Daily Mirror. She still thinks of Michel Carlier as the love of her life.

  Bernard Lavallière became an even more passionate admirer of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he met briefly one morning in January 1988 when, by chance, the artist was not completely drunk or stoned, and was not the least offended by the man in the three-piece suit and tie who spoke with such sincerity about the vibrations of his canvases.

  By the time of the artist’s death, seven months later, Lavallière owned no fewer than nine of his paintings, including five from his finest period (1981–3). In the years that followed, Bernard continued to buy more, until the American’s works began fetching prices beyond his means.

  And when the canvases he had bought for 150,000 or 200,000 francs soared in value to 10 million dollars each in 2010, the derision of his peers turned to horrified fascination and sheer hatred.

  Daniel Mercier retired to the Pays d’Auge. He ended his career as head of SOGETEC Normandy. To amuse himself, he has secretly begun writing an account of his adventure with the President’s hat. He’s written twenty pages and he’s only just getting started.

  He still cannot eat oysters and vinegar without hearing the words ‘As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week’.

  A few months after recovering his hat, François Mitterrand shattered the pollsters’ predictions and was reelected with 54.2 per cent of the vote. Weakened by illness, he spent his last Christmas at Aswan, in Egypt, before returning suddenly to France, where he died a week later, during the winter of 1996.

  He bowed out of the presidency leaving a final enigma for the nation: during his last New Year address to the French people, he uttered a curious phrase that seemed out of place amongst the usual conventions.

  Much has been said about it, but no one has given a satisfactory interpretation of its meaning. He himself never explained it. Even today, the phrase scores millions of hits on Google.

  Twenty-three seconds from the end of his address on 31 December 1994, the President looked straight into the camera: ‘I believe in the power of the spirit and I will never leave you.’

  Daniel Mercier voiced by Louise Rogers Lalaurie

  Fanny Marquant and Bernard Lavallière voiced by Emily Boyce

  Pierre Aslan voiced by Jane Aitken

  Reading Group Questions

  Daniel Mercier is overwhelmed to be in possession of François Mitterrand’s hat. Why have the iconic belongings of the famous always held such a fascination?

  François Mitterrand worked hard as a young man to overcome his inherent shyness. What do you think the book tells us about self-confidence?

  Daniel Mercier, Fanny Marquant, Pierre Aslan and Bernard Lavallière: which one of them makes the most significant life change whilst owning the hat?

  Why do you think Antoine Laurain chose these four particular temporary custodians of the hat through which to tell his story?

  How does François Mitterrand come across in the novel?

  The hat is described as a beautiful, lustrous, stylish item. Given the chance, would you have taken it and, if so, why?

  Apart from the references to technology and contemporary culture, what more does the book tell us about how life has changed since the 1980s?

  How is love depicted in the story?

  The book is light-hearted and pacy. How does the author ensure that the narrative keeps moving along?

  It was the magic of the hat that made the characters change their lives – or was it? Having read the book, what do you think?

  Interview with Antoine Laurain

  Where did the idea for The President’s Hat come from?

  Possibly from losing my own hat! It happened a few years ago. The next morning, I went back to the café where I had left it and – it was nowhere to be seen. No one had handed it in. So my disappointment was coupled with a disconcerting realisation: that all the while I was trying to retrieve my hat, someone else in some other part of the city was wearing it. I hope it wa
s a woman who did the deed, and that she’s pretty …

  What made you decide to set your story in the 1980s?

  I wanted to go back to my childhood and teenage years; the days before the internet, mobile phones, iPods and iPads and rap music, when there were only six TV channels to choose from. It’s the very recent past, but it feels like another age. The world has moved at an astonishing pace since the year 2000. Everything is happening so quickly – too quickly – and it’s speeding up all the time. I felt the need to take a step back. Judging by how well the book has been received, I wasn’t the only one.

  The President is an iconic figure in the novel. Are you an admirer of Mitterrand, the man?

  It’s difficult to imagine how anyone who was in France in the eighties could have failed to be impressed by the figure of Mitterrand, whatever their political persuasion: his noble profile; sphinx-like silences; political manoeuvres worthy of a Florentine prince; his voice and, not least, his hat. He belongs to a breed of politician we will never see again. But remember this isn’t a political novel, rather, it should be read like a kind of fable. The President only appears at the beginning and end of the book.

  There are other real-life characters and actual events featured in the novel. Do you enjoy mixing the fictional and the real?

  Very much. It’s a fundamental part of creative writing and especially so in the case of The President’s Hat. Some readers have even asked me if it was a true story! Perhaps it really did happen, without anyone knowing.